Peter Messmer
Tech-X Corporation, Boulder, CO 80303, USA
email: messmer@txcorp.com
Abstract:
Dusty plasmas are ionized gases containing small particles of solid matter. Being a very general form of plasma, they occur in space, plasma processing discharges, laboratory plasmas, and in micro gravity experiments.
To investigate the complex behavior of the dust grains with their surrounding plasma, numerical methods are required. However, due to the large discrepancy in length and time scales, simulations of dusty plasmas are computationally very demanding. Dust-plasma interactions are therefore usually treated in the fluid- or electrostatic approximation.
In this paper, we report on electromagnetic simulations of dusty plasmas, in which dielectric dust grains are modeled as simple particle absorbers. This allows to employ a highly parallel time integration scheme. First results of these simulations are presented.
After a brief motivation for dusty plasmas, a fundamental algorithm for modeling plasmas is described and some preliminary results are presented.